Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

-----and when landlords know, there would be an increase.

In fairness, we can do a lot but we cannot do everything to mitigate it. The measures to date have been well over €2 billion. Recently, our concentration is also on employment and the hospitality sector.

Many places cannot even open on Mondays and Tuesdays, such as restaurants and places serving food. One of the solutions was to reduce VAT to make it more economical for people to go to those places and to get employment back up. The best insulation we have against poverty is people getting back to work. We now have 2.5 million people in the workforce, which is a record high, even higher than it was pre-Covid. For those 2.5 million families, that is the best insulation against poverty.

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